Integrated Rate Control and Buffer Management for Scalable Video Streaming

In this paper we present a video communication scheme that integrates rate control and buffer management at the source. A transmission rate is obtained via a rate control algorithm, which employs the Program Clock References (PCR) embedded in the video streams to regulate the transmission rate in a refined way and thus reduce the client buffer requirement. The server side also maintains multiple buffers to trade off random loss for controlled loss of visually less important data. We test our system with Standard Definition Television (SDTV) and High Definition Television (HDTV) traces, and find that the proposed scheme serves best for the transmission by slowing down the transmission rate without higher buffer requirement in both cases.